Category: Android

After my recent adventures with ReactJS, I have been thinking of playing around a bit with React Native. I have looked at it before and even gave a talk on a previous version of it at a previous AndroidPhilly event. Instead of trying a new React Native app, I figured it might be a good idea to maybe try it on an Android app I am already developing (more on that later). Instagram recently wrote an interesting article on adding React Native to their existing app so I was glad there was a migration path for native apps that didn’t involve starting a React Native app from scratch.

Let go

So long Jack

Hitting compile on AndroidStudio seemed to work for a bit and then it would just hang. Not getting anything useful there, I tried to compile the app from the command line using

./gradlew installDebug

What I saw was that the process would get stuck at a compile with Jack process. Jack was a new toolchain Google was building for Android development and I was the way to use some Java 8 features on current devices. However this month Google announced they were moving away from Jack and fortunately, my app barely used it. So I decided to remove Jack from the app altogether. That worked and AndroidStudio compiled and packaged the app and I got my app running on the emulator! It looked like…

Wherefore art the JS Bundle

This seemed to be an simple network issue with the emulator not seeing the locally running server. Having dealt with this while trying to get the emulator to see a locally running rails api, I figured it was something simple. React Native comes with a build it settings activity that you can call by rage-shaking the device or executing

adb shell input keyevent 82

which brings up the options menu that you can then use to launch the Settings Activity.

Wrong Settings

…except that doing that launched my apps preferences screen. Turns out React Native was just looking for a file named preferences.xml file and launching that. It just happens my app’s preferences screen was also defined by the xml file with the same name and so there was a conflict. Changing my apps preference.xml file name got around that.

Crash

I changed the ip address on React Native’s debug screen and went back to the main activity only to have the app crash. Looking at Logcat, I got this weird error

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalAccessError:
Method 'void android.support.v4.net.ConnectivityManagerCompat.()'
is inaccessible to class 'com.facebook.react.modules.netinfo.NetInfoModule'
(declaration of 'com.facebook.react.modules.netinfo.NetInfoModule'
appears in /data/app/*****.debug-2/base.apk)
at com.facebook.react.modules.netinfo.NetInfoModule.(NetInfoModule.java:55)
at com.facebook.react.shell.MainReactPackage.createNativeModules(MainReactPackage.java:67)
at com.facebook.react.ReactInstanceManagerImpl.processPackage(ReactInstanceManagerImpl.java:793)
at com.facebook.react.ReactInstanceManagerImpl.createReactContext(ReactInstanceManagerImpl.java:730)
at com.facebook.react.ReactInstanceManagerImpl.access$600(ReactInstanceManagerImpl.java:91)
at com.facebook.react.ReactInstanceManagerImpl$ReactContextInitAsyncTask.doInBackground(ReactInstanceManagerImpl.java:184)

Oh weird. Going by this thread, it looked like an API change in Play Services recently was causing an issue. But hold on, according to the conversation, the issue was fixed in RN v22. What the heck was I using?

Listing dependencies with gradlew

I didn’t know this but you can actually list your exact dependency tree by calling

./gradlew app:dependencies

which gives you a nice dependency tree that looks like

Since the dependency stated in my build.gradle was just

compile "com.facebook.react:react-native:+"

it could be satisfied by any instance of RN gradle found on Maven Central. Except that one of the steps in setting up the project included defining the local folder in node_modules that held the latest (0.43 at the time of writing) and the only version on Maven Central was old (0.20). Turns out (after about an hour of pulling my hair out) that there was an error in the file path I had used to identify the node_module location and setting it right fixed the final issue.

Viola!

4 hours of dev or so and my app finally launched its hello world React Native screen alongside the native activities. Not too bad, I was expecting worse, given all the new tools in play. Lets hope this is worth it.

Tip:

Btw, unlike developing React for the web (using CreateReactApp), the console that you use to launch the dev server does not show the log messages. To see your app logs, use

Last week I gave a quick presentation at Android Alliance Philly on React Native, Facebook’s new framework that lets you develop native mobile apps using JavaScript and JSX, a layout language modeled after HTML and CSS. The deck is embedded below:

I have written before on how Android could be using their software navigation buttons more appropriately. Seeing how Android 5.0 and 5.1 handle screen pinning seems another one of those situations where it could leverage that capability.

For those unaware of the feature, Android 5.0 introduced a feature that allowed you to pin a certain application to the home screen. The primary use case for this feature is to prevent a child or some one you hand over your phone to to accidentally exit an app that you want them to see/use. Since the feature doesn’t require a pin number to exit the app, the feature is not so much designed for security but rather for preventing accidents. Exiting the pinned app requires you to tap the “Back” and the “Overview” screen at the same time. A feature that people may forget (though the OS does bring up a message if you do tap any of the navigation buttons when a screen is pinned). This is probably what prompted a more explicit how-to view explaining the exit action in Android 5.1.

However this feature once again doesn’t take into account the Android soft keys. When a screen is pinned, why not change the graphics for Back and Overview to pin icons. This would also reinforce the fact that the phone is in a separate “pinned screen” mode.

I am a big fan of Dribbble. For the uninitiated, its a community for designers to share parts of their work and is pretty inspirational when you are thinking of designs for your own applications. When I released FreeFlow earlier this year, I included a sample Dribbble project as part of the release to showcase the power of layout system. Since then I recieved a couple of messages from a few folks to just complete that as an app since a lot of the work was already done anyway. It also didn’t seem like there were any really compelling Dribbbble apps on the Play Store (well none that I felt were very interesting anyway). So last week I worked a bit and finished the Artbook app

Like the original source that was included in FreeFlow, Artbook is completely open source and released under the Apache 2 license. The code for the app has some ugly parts but is generally okay. Having recently acquired a 10.1” Android tablet (the Galaxy Note 10.1 mostly for drawing), I really wanted to make sure it had a fantastic tablet experience. However unlike Google’s direction to use Fragments for multi device layouts, this app does it via just a few simple if-else blocks and conditionally loading layouts. I find this approach so much simpler than any elaborate Fragment based architectures.

Anyway, I hope you give it a shot and see if you like it. I find browsing Dribbble a lot more fun using it

One of the interesting features that were released as part of Android 3.0 HoneyComb release back in 2011 was the introduction to the soft navigation buttons. To me, the system seemed full of potential as navigation buttons adapted to better educate the user as the user used the system. For example, while using an application, if the user ended up launching the keyboard, the back button would change to indicate that back would now just dismiss the keyboard and not actually go back to the previous screen.

Three years later, I am surprised that not much else was added. The back navigation while powerful still can get ambiguous at times. Below are a couple of ideas I think can really improve the user experience on Android today.

Preventing accidental over-backing

Accidentally hitting back one too many times is a problem that I encounter enough times that it really does get irritating. I am sure it happens to other app developers as well, which is why often you see developers implementing the extremely frowned upon “Are you sure you want to exit” modal alert in apps.

The soft button could really fix this problem by changing itself to indicate that you are at the last item in a stack. I am not an icon designer but here is how I imagine the soft keys changing when the user is on the only activity in the stack. The icon clarifies that hitting that button will exit the activity.

Enabling Done Discard Pattern

The constant presence of a back button causes confusion in one other place: when a user is modifying data, like adding a todo item on a list or adding a new contact. Without an explicit tap on a save button, hitting back or tapping on the Home icon now adds ambiguity to the question of whether the user wanted to save the data or not. One of the nicer patterns that emerged in Android was the Done/Discard pattern that Roman Nurik released as an Android library a while back, but because it doesn’t prevent the back button, a better way was if Android introduced a “Done Discard Activity” that would modify the back button and maybe temporarily hide the multitasking action.

What do you think? How else could the the digital nature of the Android navigation bar be used to improve Android UX?

I haven’t looked at the usage stats for PicScribe in a while. It does the couple of things I need it for and I am mostly content with the functionality. But with Material Design I was thinking of giving the app a refresh as well as add some features I had been meaning to as well.

Looking at the stats today was interesting though. Looking at my integrated Google Analytics data, it appears that majority of the app usage is happening in China where Google Play doesn’t even exist. I have no idea how they got the app, its free so it doesn’t matter, but still.